Arcserve Research Reveals Vulnerabilities in Ransomware Strategies

In response to a recent Executive Order from the Biden Administration, Arcserve has shared findings from its independent research regarding the experiences and attitudes of IT decision-makers around data protection. Arcserve’s study revealed that many organizations’ ransomware strategies are not up to par and could make it difficult to recover from an attack. These vulnerabilities range from a lack of leadership engagement in disaster recovery strategies, inadequate enterprise-wide data protection practices, incomplete disaster recovery plans, and an inability to execute data recovery testing.

Arcserve offers several different backup products, including Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), Arcserve Replication and High Availability, Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct, UDP Cloud Hybrid, and a legacy offering. UDP provides comprehensive Assured Recovery for virtual and physical environments with a unified architecture, backup, continuous availability, migration, email archiving, and an easy-to-use console. The product enables organizations to scale their IT environments easily while delivering against recovery point and recovery time objectives, on-prem, or in the cloud. It also allows for the automated disaster recovery testing of business-critical systems, applications, and data, without business downtime or impact on production systems. Recently, Arcserve merged with StorageCraft.

Arcserve’s findings shine a light on what businesses must do to combat risk and enhance their ransomware strategies. Business leaders should be more involved in determining their enterprise’s recovery capabilities, as only eight percent of those surveyed said their CEOs track metrics to ensure a comprehensive recovery plan. While some CEOs are involved in this process, 58 percent only want basic assurances that a disaster recovery plan is in place, without attempting to understand the details. Additionally, businesses must invest in better recovery technologies. Over one-third of respondents reported experiencing a data outage in the last year. Further, more than half of those businesses were not able to recover all of their data.

In a press statement, Tom Signorello, CEO at Arcserve, said, “We wholeheartedly applaud the White House initiative to improve the nation’s cybersecurity and in encouraging private enterprise to take more proactive steps to protect themselves from cyber-attacks better. While awareness of the devastation caused by ransomware has grown due to recent attacks on critical infrastructure and the nation’s energy and food supply, many organizations’ cybersecurity postures are not as robust as they should be. Protection of data from ransomware needs to be a top agenda item for executives across America. Organizations of all sizes urgently need to develop, evaluate, and implement robust data protection plans.”

Arcserve also found that 27 percent of those surveyed reported that remote and branch offices aren’t even included in their disaster recovery strategies, and 23 percent of respondents don’t test their data recovery plans. These practices open businesses up to cyber-crime and ransomware attacks, which is why Arcserve and StorageCraft recommend that all critical systems are backed up with immutable backup technology.

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